Information is increasingly being published in the media that if the Platform candidate wins next year’s presidential elections, the retirement age in Poland will be raised immediately. There are even statements that this issue has already been decided, not only at expert level but also at political level, but it cannot be made public before the presidential elections because it would seriously harm the Platform candidate. The first step would be to equalize the retirement age for women and men, that is, to raise it for women by 5 years, from the current 60 to 65, and in the second step, to raise the retirement age for everyone by another, at least 2 years. The reason lies mainly in the high budgetary subsidies to the pension system, financed by contributions from all workers, as well as in the shortage of skilled workers in the labour market, in particular.
It should be recalled that in early September, in an interview with the daily newspaper “Fakt”, the current president of the Social Security Institution (ZUS), Zbigniew Derdziuk, said directly: “the retirement age has been unfairly reduced”. The current president of the ZUS headed this institution during the previous government of Donald Tusk, in 2009-2015, exactly at the time when the then PO-PSL coalition decided to increase the retirement age. It was this institution, under the leadership of the then president, that developed various types of calculations and arguments for immediately increasing the retirement age for women and men, otherwise the financial system of the Social Security Fund (FUS) would “collapse”. Although we now know that nothing like this happened after the PiS government lowered the retirement age in 2017, moreover, for several years we have been dealing with the highest level of coverage of contributions and pensions paid (in 2022 this level was as much (85 percent, and in 2023 almost 84 percent), but these data have no meaning for the Platform politicians.
In turn, in mid-August, in an interview with Onet, the Minister of Finance and Regional Policy, Katarzyna Pełczyńska-Nałęcz, first emphasized that the retirement age for women in Poland is the lowest in Europe, and then added that the difference in the retirement age for women and men, when it comes to EU countries, occurs only in Poland and Romania. Therefore, since only Poland and Romania lag behind this EU “model” in terms of the retirement age for women, the first step should be to equalize it with the retirement age for men, that is, to increase it by 5 years. But the conclusion of these considerations by Minister Pełczyńska-Nałęcz (remember, appointed to this post by Ruch Hołownia), was the statement that in the near future it will be necessary to increase the retirement age for both women and men.
After only 9 months in power, Tusk’s team, this time with the voice of the ZUS president and a minister from his government, but also experts associated with the Platform, returns to the old song that when it comes to different retirement ages, Poland is an exception among EU countries and therefore this issue, in more general terms, needs to be “resolved”. A convenient pretext could be the EU’s excessive deficit procedure imposed on Poland this summer, in force from 2025, and to exit it, budget expenditures must be significantly reduced. Raising the retirement age, first for women and then for all workers, would save at least several billion zlotys a year in budgetary subsidies to the Social Security Fund. Of course, this cannot be announced before May or June of next year, that is, before the presidential elections, but after winning them, as the Platform assumes, by its candidate, it will be “all downhill”, such an act will be adopted by a new president from its political environment, it will certainly sign.
